I REALLY REALLY want someone to do this with a huge amount of google image thumbnails so that the google crawlers just start hitting google servers. Would it be considered malicious to do such a thing?
How I attacked myself with Google Spreadsheets (2012)
11–20 of 32 posts
Re: How I attacked myself with Google Spreadsheets (2012)
#12If content negotiation[1] had a standard way, Google's client could have told the server it was only for a thumbnail of N size and a smart server could serve less bytes.
[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Content_ne...
Re: How I attacked myself with Google Spreadsheets (2012)
#13Apparently this is a repost, but I for one missed it the first time around.
I'll just say I found it to be a highly entertaining and well-written account of a nightmare scenario I think many of us here can relate to: The unexpected and unexplained exploding AWS bill.
Re: How I attacked myself with Google Spreadsheets (2012)
#14I REALLY REALLY want someone to do this with a huge amount of google image thumbnails so that the google crawlers just start hitting google servers. Would it be considered malicious to do such a thing?
> Would it be considered malicious to do such a thing?
Maliciousness is usually described in the context of intent. So your first sentence should provide the answer to your own question. Is there a way to do what you describe such that the result is gratifying and yet doesn't cause significant duress on Google's servers and employees?
Re: How I attacked myself with Google Spreadsheets (2012)
#15I know Google has cheaper bandwidth than most, but it's still amazing that they are willing to pull 250gb every hour of every day for a single, free spreadsheet.
Re: How I attacked myself with Google Spreadsheets (2012)
#16I know Google has cheaper bandwidth than most, but it's still amazing that they are willing to pull 250gb every hour of every day for a single, free spreadsheet.
Welcome to the wonderful world of network peering.
I suspect Google is very transmit heavy on bandwidth usage. Peering agreements tend to sweeten as your rx/tx ratio approaches 1, so increasing rx on the network makes it easier to establish a peering arrangement, avoiding the need to purchase transit.
Re: How I attacked myself with Google Spreadsheets (2012)
#17Previous discussion (763 points, 143 comments). For some reason this doesn't show up in the "past" search results but shows up if you search for the domain. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3890328
New title: "How I attacked myself with Google Spreadsheets (2012)" (I assume someone added the 2012 later.)
Old title: "How I attacked myself using Google and I ramped up a $1000 bandwidth bill"
I think that the problem is that Algolia looks for results with all the words, the new title has the word "Spreadsheets" that is not in the old title.
I think Algolia has an option to allow variations and typos in words, but not an option to match most of the words (like 4 of 5 words).
Re: How I attacked myself with Google Spreadsheets (2012)
#18Does anyone know if Google ended up changing their behavior on this? I'm struggling to see why this is a legitimate design decision on their part - how is downloading a new copy every hour different from maintaining a persistent cache wherever they are storing it after download?
> Since these URLs are private, Google does not want to store them anywhere permanently in the Google servers.
Yeah, I read that part, I just don't understand it. They are obviously storing the contents of the image somewhere (in memory?) for an hour, otherwise there's no point prefetching it in the first place. At the end of that hour, they download it again. If the image isn't different, they would be better off not throwing away the old copy.
Re: How I attacked myself with Google Spreadsheets (2012)
#19> What I find fascinating in this setting is that Google becomes such a powerful weapon due to a series of perfectly legitimate design decisions. It does have a certain "perfect storm of good intentions" quality, but no, "prefetching" hundreds of gigabytes worth of images that the user is not looking at right now* and that will not be cached for the next time the user views it, that the user did not indicate will be…
I'm gonna test it out on a much smaller scale, and slightly different setup. I just grabbed 3 images from a rarely used server hosted with DigitalOcean, with a custom domain, and put them in a new Google Sheet using the same =image(url) technique the author mentioned. The access logs show Feedfetcher-Google; (+http://www.google.com/feedfetcher.html)" grabbed each of the images once immediately which makes sense. I'll check back in a few hours and see if there are any other requests.
Edit: I also grabbed 3 different images and put them in a separate sheet. I'm gonna leave one open on my desktop and not open the other and see if that changes the requests.
One Hour Later: I think that Google is probably grabbing images On-Demand now. There are 12 total requests on my 6 images. The first 6 are sporadic, which correspond to when I added the images to the sheets. Then the next 3 are in the same second, which come from opening the sheet on my desktop. And the last 3 also came in the same second, again from opening that sheet on my desktop. I kept one open and closed the other and neither have had the images requested since.
Re: How I attacked myself with Google Spreadsheets (2012)
#20I know Google has cheaper bandwidth than most, but it's still amazing that they are willing to pull 250gb every hour of every day for a single, free spreadsheet.
Welcome to the wonderful world of network peering. I suspect Google is very transmit heavy on bandwidth usage. Peering agreements tend to sweeten as your rx/tx ratio approaches 1, so increasing rx on the network makes it easier to establish a peering arrangement, avoiding the need to purchase transit.
Is that why download traffic (incoming data) is free on EC2?